The Scientific Method For Beginners

the pride of the Christian really does have no bound..."a bit excessive" !!! It was an outright falsehood, whether deliberate or not. And you wonder why you generate such hostility in others. And when you talk about denying God, are you talking about just Yahweh, or were you including Allah, Vishnu, Zeus, and Thor?

This is my own concern. We are forced into not only treating the conclusion as tentative, but every step, sub-step, and micro-step along the 10,000 year long path from "rocks fall when dropped" to "Hubble mirror can be corrected by use of X". If at each micro-step we have a finite probability of error, then the accumulated error by the final conclusion could well be material... is it?

No, definitely not. Nosy and Mod have explained this well, so there's no need to repeat, but just to emphasise that *this* physicist certainly agrees with their sentiments.

I agree, and this is where I think we have a problem with the (over) enphasis on tentativity. The existence of gravity we regard as an observation, an input into our theory. But it too is the result of a process that actually means that our observation of gravity is the tentative conclusion of a process. As I stated before, each step, sub-step, and micro-step is reduced to a level of tentativity. For science to progress in accordance with the tenets of tentativity, one must caveat every possible micro-step. If we did this, I think we would still be banging rocks together...

I am very confused by this. The vast difference between a theory and a law should be second nature to you if you are a practising scientist, and your conflation is very strange. I appreciate that gravitation and relativity may not be your field, but I would stress the same were we talking about the relationship between thermodynamic "laws" and statistical mechanics.

No, no, no - couldn't be further from the truth! A law is an embodiment of observation, not of theory.

** duplicate post **Edited by cavediver, : removing duplicate post

Not usually - loosely, they are cases of building mathematical relationships to explain the observations. If there is generalisation that leads to predictions at the time unobserved, then you could argue that you are moving into the territory of a theory. But this is now outside the auspices of a law. But that doesn't stop a law forming the theory behind some previous law, e.g. you can view Newton LoG as forming the theory behind Kepler I, II, and III. Crudely, laws tell you how it is, and theories tell you why it is. And a law, by its nature, is always exceptionally tentat

ExactlyEdited by cavediver, : No reason given.

Actually, we do. This is Maxwell's electromagnetism or the theory of electromagnetism. The laws explained by this theory are those you have mentioned, all empirically derived from observation. But Maxwell unified these laws into his theory, and went on to predict electromagnetic radiation.

Yes, because they are the equations resulting from Maxwell's Theory But we commonly speak of Maxwell Theory in relativity, quantum gravity, and string theory. When we combine the actions of Maxwell Theory with other actions, we speak of, for example, Einstein-Maxwell Theory, Maxwell-Yang-Mills Theory, Maxwell-Chern-Simons Theory.